Breadcrumb navigation:

Adding a Link

important security and accessibility information below

PLEASE NOTE:

Do not send out links in emails to external web sites. BC departments needing to instruct members of the BC community to link to an external web site should direct the users to a page at Boston College first, and have that page, in turn, link to the actual destination. This is necessary to prevent against phishing attacks.

Please follow UDL (accessibility) guidelines in creating a link:

Give links unique names and make them descriptive. Avoid "Click Here" or "More".

Link text should describe the action to be performed or the destination of the link.

Screen reading software provides a popular feature to browse the links of a page out of context. As such, there should never be two links on a page that use the same text.

Descriptive links are also beneficial to search engines so they can create context and relationships between link text and link destinations.

To add a link to a page, open either the BC Text Component or BC Text Image Component. Enter and highlight the text you want to be the link. Click on the Hyperlink icon in the top row of the toolbar. It looks like a small globe with a grey chain link on it.

This brings up the Hyperlink dialog box. Here you can set up external links by typing the link into the "Link to" text field. For example, to make a link to the external web site, type in 'www.externalsitename.com' in the "Link to" text field.

Or you can make a internal "relative" link to any Adobe CQ page or file by clicking on the drop down arrow at the right side of the the "Link to" text field and navigating to the desired link with the BC CQ site.

PLEASE NOTE: It is highly recommened that editors use the "relative" link method when creating links within CQ. When links are created this way, CQ will maintain the "relative" link when any of the pages involved are moved--the links will not be broken.

Adding an Email Link

Follow the instructions for adding a link, but type in the following in the "Link to" text box: "mailto:example@example.com" (without the quotes). See screenshot below.

Adding a Link to a PDF or any other type of file in the Digital Asset Manager (DAM)

Making a link to file in the Digital Asset Manager is similar to the process described above. As above select the word(s) you want to have link on and click the Hyperlink button, after clicking the down-arrow drop down on the HREF field, look for the "Digital Assets" folder and work down through the folders under it to find the file you want to link to. Select that file by clicking once on its name, then click the OK button to complete your link. Remember that the file you are linking to must be activated for your link to work on the www.bc.edu server.

Adding a Link to a Photo with an Image Map

After adding an image using the BC Image component, you will see four icons that pertain to editing the image below image: Map, Crop, Rotate and Clear. The first one, Map, allows you to map the image to the link.The second one lets you crop an image, the third icon lets you rotate the position of the image and the fourth clears the image if you decide you no longer want to use the image you selected. For this purpose you will want to use the first icon, "Map." When you click the Map icon a tool box will appear with various options. Select the Rectangle shape and draw a rectangle around your image by dragging from the top left corner to the bottom right corner.

After selecting the image and drawing the frame, you will then need to add the HREF. Like before select the HREF option and follow the path and direct the image to the link you want or type in the url.